To Catch a King

by Charles Spencer

  They set off for Long Marston in the Vale of Evesham, where they planned to break the journey to Bristol. With them went Henry Lascelles, a trusted cousin of Jane’s who had served as a cornet in Colonel Lane’s regiment, and who was aware of Charles’s true identity. Also in the party were Jane’s sister Withy, and brother-in-law John Petre. They were from Horton in Buckinghamshire, and were heading for Lord Paget’s house near Windsor. The Petres planned to go their separate way on reaching Stratford-upon-Avon. They had no idea that the very tall attendant who rode with Jane was in fact their would-be king.

  Lord Wilmot rode out half a mile ahead of the king and his companions, accompanied by his servant Robert Swan and by Colonel Lane. As usual, Wilmot had not allowed himself to suffer the indignity of a disguise. Instead, he had a hawk on his hand and spaniels at his heels. If challenged, he planned to say that he was a gentleman called Morton, who was out hunting. Despite the feebleness of this premise, it is only fair to note that, yet again, Wilmot was happy to meet any oncoming dangers first. Indeed, his riding out from Bentley provides almost the perfect snapshot of him: stubborn to the point of stupidity over the need for concealment, but at the same time endlessly brave in his devotion to his king.

  Having travelled by separate routes, the two parties would meet up at Abbots Leigh, the house near Bristol that Captain Stone had specified as Jane’s destination on his invaluable pass. In the meantime Wilmot and Swan rode towards Packington Hall in Warwickshire, where Wilmot had a friend who could be relied upon to hide him. He was Sir Clement Fisher, who had served as a captain in Colonel Lane’s regiment in the Civil War. Wilmot would then move on to the home of John Winter in Dyrham, north of Bath.

  Charles encountered a problem early on in his journey. Within two hours of setting off, after passing through Rowley Regis and Quinton, his horse shed a shoe. Repairing to the nearby wool town of Bromsgrove, they sought out a blacksmith. Once the man had set about shoeing his horse, Charles fell into conversation with him, asking what news he had heard from other parts recently. Worcester was only sixteen miles away, so the king would have been confident that fallout from the previous week’s battle would be in the blacksmith’s arsenal of gossip.

  Charles would later recall, with mischievous delight, the unfiltered thoughts that the Bromsgrove blacksmith shared with him: ‘He told me there was no news that he knew of since the good news of the beating of the rogues, the Scots. I asked him whether there was none of the English taken that joined with the Scots. He answered that he did not hear that that rogue, Charles Stuart, was taken, but some of the others were taken, but not Charles Stuart. I told him that if that rogue were taken he deserved to be hanged more than all the rest, for bringing in the Scots. Upon which he said that I spoke like an honest man, and so we parted.’

  The party resumed its journey. At Wootton, just short of Stratford-upon-Avon, they could make out ahead of them a troop of Parliamentary cavalry, the men dismounted, the horses chewing grass. John Petre panicked, revealing to the others that the enemy had roughed him up on more than one occasion, and that he would not suffer the same treatment again.

  With Petre refusing to ride on, Charles quietly pleaded with Jane Lane to persuade all the party to continue on their way together, otherwise he was afraid that the enemy would become suspicious, and ride to see why some of their number had suddenly turned to avoid them. It was all in vain: the Petres separated from the group, and rode off in a different direction to Stratford-upon-Avon.

  Fortunately for the king, the cavalrymen proved more interested in making the most of their break than in investigating the splitting up of a small knot of travellers. Maybe it was because Charles’s group had women in its number. Jane, Charles and Lascelles passed through the enemy unit, exchanging pleasantries, and were able to carry on without any further excitements.

  They safely reached the home of Jane’s cousins John and Amy Tombes in Long Marston, where they were to spend the night. It had already been decided that they would not share Charles’s identity with their hosts. He was introduced as the servant William Jackson, and was sent to lend a hand to the household staff.

  Charles was shown to the kitchen. It was an alien environment for a king. The cook told him to help with the meat that was being prepared for dinner that night. She pointed him towards the jack – an antiquated piece of domestic machinery that helped turn the spit – thinking that would be the best place to deploy his helping hand.

  The king was stumped. Although always interested in gadgetry and mechanics, he could make no sense of the contraption that now confronted him. After a pause, he gave it a heave, but succeeded only in sending it spinning in the wrong direction, the workings screeching in protest at their rough treatment.

  The furious cook came over to scold him. ‘What countryman are you, that you know not how to wind up a jack?’ It was a question that could have provoked panic, but Charles kept calm. ‘I am a poor tenant’s son of Colonel Lane, in Staffordshire,’ he claimed. ‘We seldom have roast meat, but when we have, we don’t make use of a jack.’ The cook still clucked away in a fury, but without doubting that what the clumsy young man had just told her was the truth.

  Charles’s reply shows not only commendable unflappability, but also observational intelligence. He had, by this point of his escape attempt, spent enough time witnessing the hand-to-mouth existence of the poorer rural element to understand something of their economic, and dietary, reality. Even though there was no longer a Penderel by his side, the lessons they had taught him remained invaluable. He had learnt a lot since insensitively ordering mutton for his dinner when a guest in a poor man’s home.

  On Thursday, 11 September the party continued on to Cirencester, where they appear to have spent the night in an inn called the Crown. The next day they rode a further forty miles, through Chipping Sodbury, to reach the destination allowed by their military pass.

  Abbots Leigh, three miles west of Bristol, had a tantalising view over the Bristol Channel. It was the home of George Norton and his heavily pregnant wife Ellen. The Royalist party arrived there in the evening, their hosts again unaware of Charles’s identity. But this was a large country house, with a correspondingly sizeable staff, and the king’s carefully contrived anonymity was about to receive a major challenge.

  Charles was astonished and deeply troubled to find that the butler of the house was a man he knew from many years back. His name was John Pope, and he had been part of the domestic household that the king knew during his boyhood at the Palace of Richmond. Pope had later enlisted in the Royalist cavalry, serving alongside Charles at Lichfield in Staffordshire, where he had seen the then Prince of Wales up close. Given the context of their meeting now, though, Pope at this stage failed to recognise his former master.

  As part of a prearranged plan, Jane Lane announced on arrival that her servant Jackson was recovering from a fever, and asked Pope to take him somewhere quiet, so he could rest. This was an effective way of removing Charles from exposure to all of the house’s many visitors, servants and tradesmen; he was put in Pope’s quarters, where he was attentively looked after by Margaret Rider, one of the Nortons’ maids.

  In the morning Charles went downstairs to share a servant’s breakfast of bread and butter, with ale and sherry. He was joined by Pope and two others, one of whom began regaling the small group with a detailed account of the battle of Worcester. Charles feared that this man may have been fighting for Parliament, but gentle enquiry revealed that he was in fact one of his own men: he had served in Charles’s Guards’ Regiment under Major Broughton, an officer the king knew well (and who, Charles was unaware, had been captured when fleeing from Worcester).

  Charles could not resist asking the raconteur what sort of man the king really was. The Royalist gave an exact description of the king’s clothes and horse on the day of the battle, before addressing his mighty height, telling ‘Jackson’ that Charles was ‘at least three fingers taller’ than even he was. The king quickly withdrew f
rom the room, fearing that the storyteller might at any moment realise his true identity, and blurt it out.

  Pope accompanied him as he exited into the hall. At that moment Ellen Norton passed by, and Charles removed his hat in a sign of courteous respect for the lady of the house. It was then that the king felt the full glare of Pope’s eyes on him, as they devoured his features. Pretending not to notice, or to be concerned by, Pope’s obvious interest, Charles went for a walk outside.

  On his return he was met by Henry Lascelles, who was in a highly agitated state. ‘What shall we do?’ Lascelles asked. ‘I am afraid Pope knows you, for he says very positively to me that it is you, but I have denied it.’ Despite Lascelles’s protestations, Pope remained utterly convinced that Jackson was the king. Charles asked Lascelles if he thought Pope trustworthy. His dependability was, Lascelles said, beyond doubt. Charles had already formed the same opinion, and told Lascelles he had better bring Pope to him immediately.

  The king straight away admitted to Pope who he really was, and told him what a relief it was to stumble across such a stalwart supporter at a time when he needed faithful friends more than on any other occasion in his life. Pope declared himself equally happy, but also very concerned. He explained that there were some in the Nortons’ household who were enemies of the Crown. But now that he knew for sure that Jackson was his king, he vowed that he would do anything he could to keep him safe.

  Charles took immediate advantage of the offer, sending Pope into Bristol to see if there were any ships that were preparing to set sail for France or Spain. Pope returned with the disappointing, and surprising, news that none were due to leave for either country in the coming month.

  Charles now informed Pope that he was expecting Wilmot’s imminent arrival at Abbots Leigh. Pope warned that this was out of the question: Wilmot must not come to the house, because many people there knew him by sight, and several of these were his enemies. He volunteered to wait for Wilmot at a safe distance from the property, and intercept him. After doing this successfully, Pope took Wilmot to an inn, to pass the time till nightfall. He then guided him secretly through the darkness to Abbots Leigh, and led him to Charles’s room.

  Charles consulted with Pope and Wilmot as to his next move. He decided to head for Trent House, four miles north-west of Sherborne in Dorset. It was the new home of an old acquaintance, Francis Wyndham, and his wife Anne. She was from the wealthy Gerrard family, and they had been married five years. The Wyndhams had moved to Trent earlier in 1651, having amicably split the inheritance of four Dorset estates with Anne’s sister and co-heir.

  The Wyndhams were part of a strong Royalist network, connected by marriage and blood. Francis was a brother-in-law of John Winter, with whom Wilmot had so recently been staying in Gloucestershire. Anne’s sister was married to Bullen Reymes, a Royalist infantry colonel who had fought in the south-west on Charles I’s behalf, and who had been imprisoned in Taunton Castle the previous year because of his continued loyalty to the Crown. Francis’s eldest brother, Sir Edmund, had led the defence of Bridgwater Castle in the summer of 1645, while his feisty sister-in-law Christabella had been wet-nurse to Charles as a baby, governess to him as a boy, and his first lover as a youth. It was she who, with bared breast, had taken a potshot at Cromwell shortly before Bridgwater fell to the New Model Army. To complete the bonds of loyalty to the Crown, Edmund and Christabella’s son, Sir Hugh Wyndham, was a Cavalier colonel known to Charles since childhood.

  Francis Wyndham’s record of loyalty to the Crown was impressive in its own right. He had served under Charles I as a colonel from 1643, when he had been made governor of Dunster Castle, near Minehead in Somerset. Charles had briefly stayed there with Wyndham in May 1645. Four months later, when the Royalist military cause was beyond repair, Wyndham and his garrison were holed up in a siege. So stubborn was their resistance that Colonel Robert Blake, the Parliamentary commander, ordered Wyndham’s mother to be placed directly in his line of fire. Blake’s sappers had failed to bring about Dunster Castle’s surrender with their subterranean explosions, but Blake hoped the threat of his mother’s imminent death would persuade the garrison commander to yield.

  But Blake had failed to take into account Elizabeth Wyndham’s courage. She was defiant in the face of death, urging her son to do his duty and fight on for the king, whatever her fate. Impressed by such bravery, Blake spared her. Dunster Castle eventually fell after 160 days of defiance, Francis Wyndham being allowed to surrender on generous terms. It was one of the last Royalist strongholds to succumb to the inevitable.

  The circle entrusted with the king’s safety remained necessarily tight, as the search for him was still intense. When the king had briefly stayed as Francis Wyndham’s guest six years earlier, he had done so as an honoured and fêted prince. Now he was attempting to cross country thickly infested with the enemy, his status that of the most hunted man in the country.

  On the evening of Monday, 15 September, the night before his departure for Trent House, it seemed the king’s plans of moving on would have to be shelved. Ellen Norton’s pregnancy ended in heartbreak. She went into labour, but suffered a stillbirth. She was not only distraught at her loss, but also dangerously ill. Clearly Jane Lane would be expected to attend to the cousin whose pregnancy had given her a reason to travel so far from home.

  Charles knew that, despite the Norton family’s dreadful loss, he had to leave Abbots Leigh as soon as he could. The excuse of his needing to rest while recovering from illness could not hold for much longer. The more he mingled in this household, which it was known contained some who were his enemies, the greater the risk of his being identified, captured and executed.

  It was Charles who thought of the necessary ruse to get away from the house. He had a letter composed that purported to come from Jane Lane’s sixty-six-year-old father, telling her that he was seriously ill and feared he was about to die. His final wish was that his daughter should come to him to say her goodbyes, and receive his blessing. Pope presented the letter to Jane at dinner. She carried off the pretence of profound shock convincingly, sobbing at this latest terrible family news.

  On the morning of Tuesday, 16 September, thirteen days after the defeat at Worcester, and four days after their arrival at Abbots Leigh, the fugitives set off for Francis Wyndham’s home in Dorset. They broke their journey by spending the night in the manor house of Castle Cary, a market town in Somerset, twelve miles south-east of Wells. Castle Cary’s church had been stripped of its lead roof by Parliamentary soldiers six years earlier. The rebels had peeled it back and melted it down to make musketballs to fire at the Royalist garrison defending Sherborne Castle.

  Charles’s host that night was Edward Kirton, the steward of Castle Cary, who worked for one of the Royalists’ leading generals, the Marquess of Hertford. Hertford had been Charles’s governor in the early 1640s, and was a loyal servant of Charles I, remaining with him throughout the trial for his life. He had then acted as one of the late king’s pallbearers at the modest funeral in Windsor that followed. The younger Charles would later declare that Hertford was ‘an extraordinary person, who hath merited as much of the king my father and myself as a subject can do’.5

  Moving on from Castle Cary, Charles reached Trent House on Wednesday, 17 September. Francis and Anne Wyndham lived there with their three-year-old son. Their home was set in a largely Parliamentary community, next to the village’s thirteenth-century church, St Andrew’s.

  The Wyndhams were waiting in a field for the king to arrive. When Charles spotted the colonel, he shouted out, ‘Frank! Frank! How dost thou do?’ Wyndham started to cry – he had heard that the king had been killed at Worcester, and had not dared to believe otherwise until now, when he could see Charles for himself. Jane Lane and Henry Lascelles left the king at Trent and continued on their way.

  Charles was now reunited with Wilmot, and the two of them met with their host to discuss options for escape. Wyndham proposed that his friend Giles Strangwayes, anothe
r Royalist colonel, might be able to advise the king on which harbour to head for to get away abroad. Wyndham duly rode the ten miles to Strangwayes’ home, but Strangwayes proved unable to help. He was aware that the Parliamentarians were watching him very closely, and that if he were seen near any of the ports it would arouse strong suspicion. It was better if he played no part, because he would only prove a liability if he did. Assuming that the king was in need of funds, Strangwayes sent him all the money he had – £100 in gold pieces – and his apologies for not being able to do more.

  Feeling sure that the king was safe at Trent House, where some of his family knew his true identity, Wyndham decided to scout out the ports himself, pretending to be ‘Captain Norris’. He had two contacts that he hoped might help. They were both in Lyme Regis, which at that time was a busier port than Liverpool, thanks to its steady traffic with Continental Europe, and its key position between Bristol and the English Channel.

  Lyme Regis had been described by the sixteenth-century local historian John Leyland as ‘a pretty market town set in the roots of an high rocky hill down to the hard shore. There cometh a shallow brook from the hills about three miles by north, and cometh fleeting on great stones through a stone bridge in the bottom.’6 This picturesque spot was something of a precious jewel to the Parliamentarians, having gained fame in 1644 when its garrison of 500 men, assisted with enthusiasm by the town’s inhabitants, had survived an eight-week siege by 4,000 Royalists commanded by one of Charles I’s nephews, the much-feared Prince Maurice of the Rhine.

  This successful resistance had been achieved despite Lyme Regis having few fortifications, other than earthworks that had been quickly constructed. A lot of this work was completed by women of the town who had disguised themselves as men, to convince the Royalists that there were more soldiers ready to meet them than was the case. After the fighting began, the women remained active, ferrying ammunition and reloading muskets. When the Royalists rained fire arrows onto their houses, the townspeople stripped their roofs bare to prevent the flames from spreading.